Returning to Eden

The Year 2176

“I wanted you to be the first to know”, Rowan tentatively confided, “Sarah and I are expecting a baby.”

Mary, the secretary, shrieked with delight and almost knocked the mug of coffee off her desk as she bear hugged him enthusiastically. They had worked in the same advertising firm for five years. He did art work for commercials.

Using nanotechnology that had come to fruition in the year 2030, he and other staff members were able to access their computer terminals with their minds and project their artistic ideas onto a screen. Once an advertisement was completed, it could be sent to the 'cloud', where interested members of the public could access it, projected to an electronic billboard, sent directly from one brain to another (in the case of stubborn people more resistant to advertising) or it could be teleported to various mailboxes in the form of traditional leaflets - great for those who liked the nostalgia of paper. Each billboard advertisement would only appear when interested parties - the right target audience - was nearby because they could tap into the thoughts of those in the vicinity.

Mary liked to think she oversaw the office. It was rather difficult to slack off and spend one's time searching the web when your brain was connected to AI, which was in turn, network connected to all the computers in the office, including your bosses. This meant that unless you used secret browsing - a function not allowed at work - anyone could see your thoughts. Mary imputed data into computer files and did person to person calls now that telephones were no longer needed.

She found her job repetitive and tedious and aside from the monetary credits to her microchip, her main reason for going to work was to involve herself in the lives of her colleagues. Her husband worked long hours and they had no family aside from his aging mother. She enjoyed the company and the banter. She had been a passive observer of Rowan's life over the years, watching his frustration as he and his wife waited to be accepted for a baby and his disappointment as they slipped further down the list. Eventually she stopped asking him about it, interpreting his quiet demeanour as resigned acceptance that he may not be a father.

“You didn’t tell me she’d had surgery!” Mary exclaimed excitedly.

“No”, his eyes gleamed with the expectancy of a child at Christmas, “We got the call up two months ago, but as they’d cancelled so many times before, we didn’t want to say anything in case it fell through. She passed all her tests with flying colors so they operated and did the transfer. I can’t believe we’re going to be parents in seven months!”

“What gender did you choose or is it a secret?” Mary asked.

“A boy”, Rowan shone with pride, “Every dad wants a son to watch the match with, right?”

She socked him in the shoulder playfully.

“Guess I’d better buy blue bootees, then.”

Rowan projected an image of the bonny blonde haired, blue eyed baby boy into her mind, a stock image from the Cryo Baby catalogue. This was given to all couples who had been approved to have a child. It had approximately 5,000 children in it, of varying appearance, race and personality. You could pick the hair and eye colour, skin colour, height, temperament and skills. If you wanted a softly spoken child who was good at composing music like his mother or aunty, you could pick a child that most closely resembled your family from the brochure. Cryo Baby or one of the many in vitro fertilisation companies would then create an embryo for you.

Quota rules meant that only one child of each design could be picked within a 200 mile radius. This limited the possibility of meeting anyone who looked exactly the same as you. The chosen embryo could either be grown in the lab and given to the parents at the end of the nine months gestation, or, if the mother wanted to experience pregnancy, as some women did, they could have the clips removed that were placed at birth on all baby girls to avoid a future 'primitive' pregnancy.

Mary smiled at the image of the baby with dimples in his cheeks and a mischievous smile, holding a stacking cube in his hand.

"Good choice", she said, "He's a cutie."

“Ahem!”, a coughing sound came from the doorway as Mary looked up to see her manager standing there.

“May I remind you that the draft of our latest advertising campaign has to be completed by this evening. You have submitted less work this week than the last. If your performance slips below the accepted level, your social credit score will drop and then it'll be difficult for you to get transportation. I don't want to have to suspend one of my best workers!"

Mary nodded and went back to her terminal but found it difficult to concentrate after that. She just wanted it to be six o clock so she could leave.

Despite the manager's warning, she still had enough credit to board the automatic tram, as despite her concentration difficulties, she had always tried to do her best as a citizen. The electric cars of the past, introduced in the wake of 21st century pollution, had eventually paved the way for completely automated transportation. All the driver had to do was press a few buttons on their dashboard to input where they wanted to go. At some point in time, politicians realised that such technology could reduce crime rates if the driver was not able to go anywhere they would like. Cars were programmed to only go to a select number of destinations and at select speeds that could not exceed speed limits. This put a stop to felons skipping bail and high speed chases. Of course, there was still some degree of choice. A driver could pick public transportation via a tram or train, something chosen by most citizens to avoid the heavy taxes levied on car ownership, or they could buy their own vehicle. Manual override was also possible in the case of computer viruses or malfunction, but this was set to work only with the vehicle's pre-programmed destinations.

Mary chose the tram to get to and from work each day. After waving her wrist microchip to pay for her ticket, she chose a seat in the far end of the last carriage. It was quieter than the other carriages and did not smell as strongly of scented air conditioner than the fuller carriages. She thought this would give her the opportunity to connect to her E-reader and download a copy of 'Pride and Prejudice', a fabulous 19th century romance she had been looking forward to escaping into. She loved history and was an ardent fan of romantic fiction, so much so that she'd married a history professor and expert in antiquated sciences. Conversations with him were never boring and she never ran out of things to say or needed to access her conversation prompt. Drifting off into her book and absorbing herself into long past lives should then have been easy, but it surprised her to find that her mind would not focus.

She tried to read her Ebook but kept losing her place and absent-mindedly looking out of the window. The image of Rowan's baby boy kept superseding over the novel text, making it impossible to read. As the tram sped passed a billboard, its image shimmered into a bright eyed smiling baby, with dark chocolate brown hair just like Mary's. The baby, a little girl, was holding a building brick. The words ‘Cryo Baby’ were emblazoned across the top, together with a direct telepathy number so that she could tap into fertility specialists from the company. She never noticed billboards before and actively avoided looking at them since she worked in advertising all day, but after Rowan’s news, she suddenly counted four advertisements from different cryogenics companies in the short journey home, appearing on the screens as she travelled passed. One of them she had seen colleagues working on in her office.

Averting her eyes from the billboard, she glanced across the fields around her, now nothing more than barren, cracked earth. In humankind’s enthusiasm for technology, they had rushed ahead in their advancements without adequate safety testing and levels of electromagnetic radiation had become dangerously high. According to history books she had read, bees lay dead in swarms on the ground, butterflies tried to fly out over the ocean and birds fell out of the sky, guts spewing out with blood around their beaks like tales from the bible where the rivers ran red with blood. Her ancestors tried to pass these off as nothing more than unusual anomalies until crops began to fail, with no bees to pollinate them. This led to what became known as ‘the second great starvation’ (the first being the potato famine of 1845-49). Many lives were lost so genetic engineering spread out into the avenue of food simulation - the art of producing authentic and nutritious food that you didn’t have to grow on a farm and that would not die from excess radiation.

Across the barren landscape there were several large, rectangular, tall and rather harsh steel buildings reaching into the sky. These were where food simulations were made. Mary reflected that they looked as synthetic as the food they produced. Real food still existed, of course, but these were grown for exhibits at museums. Some types of tree were still grown naturally to produce oxygen but most of these had to be gene edited to ensure they were robust enough to cope with the pollution. Ugly aluminium ‘tree’ sculptures were dotted around the factory buildings in a display of so-called ‘natural’ art, but hanging baskets or vines might have made the buildings seem less severe.

Overhead, clusters of glass and steel houses swam into view, dotting the hillsides with their twinkling lights. Nearly all were identical aside from their size and location. In the evening sky, lines of satellites floated. Mary had read that in times past, people used to be able to see stars in the sky once night fell. With the advent of lightning fast sky internet, satellite pollution had made this impossible. Never mind, though, her tutor had said, the lights from the satellites were just as pretty and their inception had heralded the arrival of technology that could connect the human brain to machinery, the start of the trans-humanist age. Mary sighed, put her Ebook in her handbag and fastened her coat in readiness to disembark. She tried to mentally dissuade herself from the idea of having a child. She wasn’t sure why, but something felt wrong about it. The new world, the only one she’d known since birth, had been made better by the post-modernist AI age, but she’d always had this uneasy feeling that she couldn’t quite place, a thought that maybe it was too ordered to bring a child into. Only now she was shocked to discover the deafening tick of her biological clock.

The automatic tram shuddered to a halt outside her house, a wooden lodge style property with a white painted fence and perfectly manicured artificial flower beds, modelled after a 20th century dwelling. It stuck out like a sore thumb amongst all the glass and steel dwellings and had come to the attention of town councillors, who were always wary of individualism. Such signs of free thinking were considered a danger sign for extremism, a sign of possible terrorism. She had received an ominous knock at the door from two council members dressed in black office suits, asking why she had white picket fences and why her house was made of wood. As she was married to a history professor, her explanation sufficed. They both had an avid love of all things historical, and what better way to engender enthusiasm in his students than to incorporate aspects of the past into their lives? Had he not been a teacher of history, her quirky style might have resulted in further questioning.

As she reached the front door of her home, she waved her wrist across the door’s censor and the hall light switched on. A computerised voice said

“Welcome home, Mrs Freeman.”

The door swung open and she walked in, greeted by the inviting smell of an instant simulated roast dinner and the sound of the domestic bot whirring around, getting cutlery out in preparation for the meal. Domestic robots were now so realistic that aside from the faint whirr of their engine, it was impossible to tell them apart from human beings just by sight. When ordering a robot, you could have one made up to look female, male, or if you didn’t care, gender neutral. Most robots on the market were ‘male’ or gender neutral because the manufacturers didn’t want to be seen as being ‘sexist’ by producing too many ‘female’ domestic helpers. Their robot was called ‘George’ and he was an expert at rustling up restaurant quality meals in minutes.

Mary’s husband Jon was in the lounge, watching the news on the big screen. For a history professor, he worked odd hours. Often he was away from home long after his class was dismissed and an insecure wife might have had her suspicions that he was having an affair, but he just enjoyed chilling with his friend Josh, a colleague from the genetics department who taught genetic sciences. Mary sometimes quizzed him on why the two of them spent so much time together and she joked that the two of them should have been married, but today he was home early and was channel hopping while he waited for dinner.

“Channel 5400”, he commanded.

The voice activated TV changed the channel. You could also order food from your TV, indulge in instant shopping (small items could be materialised right there) or speak to your doctor from the comfort of your home.

A ‘Design-a-Bebe’ commercial aired as she stepped into the room.

“Are you ready for the patter of tiny feet? Choose your little one from our brochure of beautiful babies, boys or girls, any hair or eye color you choose. Uniqueness guaranteed within 200 miles of your home. You won’t find another baby the same. 100% disease-free guarantee. Terms and conditions apply.”

Mary sighed and Jon looked around at her from his comfy spot on their fully adjustable leather sofa.

“Hi – was work rough today?”

“No”, she replied, “Rowan told me he and Sarah are having a baby.”

“Well, that’s great! Why are you looking so glum, then?”

“Jon…”, she hesitated, “we’ve been married two years. I’m ready. I want a baby.”

Jon switched the big screen off and looked reflective and a little worried.

“Okay, I’ll video call the doctor in the morning.”

The Next Evening

Mary passed up an invite to an after-work bar jaunt and instead took the automatic tram to Dr Godleaves office, where Jon was waiting for her at the tram stop. They waved their wrists at the censor on the entrance door and it lit up.

“Welcome to Godleave Health, patients Freeman and Freeman.”

The door opened and they went into the waiting room. It had a faint aroma of roses. A group of elderly people wearing old fashioned jeans and shirts nervously waited for the clinic’s computer to bring up their microchip numbers. There wasn’t any talking between them at all. A couple that looked at least 90 and had the tell-tale signs of wrinkles across their faces, held onto each other with thin, wizened hands, their wedding rings glinting in the artificial light. It was obviously the OAP clinic that night. Elderly people were summoned to a medical examination every year. If any problems were detected, their microchips were turned off and they were sent to a hospice for a dignified death scenario. It gave extra meaning to the saying ‘your number is up’. Unsurprisingly, none of them felt like chatting.

TV screens showed alternating scenes of relaxation and nature and if you connected to them, they would show you the most beautiful scene of your mind’s eye. This was supposed to calm the patients but most of the elderly ones were too nervous to allow a meaningful connection.

At the opposite side of the waiting room sat some younger couples and two noticeably pregnant women in their 30’s. They were waiting for the conception and birth clinic. Mary smiled at the elderly people and sat down next to one of the pregnant women.

When her chip number flashed on the screen, they were ushered through to Dr Godleave’s examining room.

“Hello”, he said, seeming to peer down at her, “Jon told me that you both wish to apply for a child.”

She nodded in agreement, wanting to appear as hospitable as possible.

The doctor glanced at his electronic chart.

“Your record shows that last year you received injections to cure depression.”

Mary’s stomach seemed to sink into her shoes and Jon gripped her hand.

“My…my mother died in a crash when the automatic tram she was riding in, malfunctioned. She was only 55, I just wasn’t expecting it. You think they’re going to last until they’re 90 and then have their chip removed in comfortable surroundings, not die in a river when they get derailed. I…I just felt down and shocked.”

“But she got over it quickly”, interjected Jon, “She was as right as rain after those shots you gave her.”

She put on a broad smile, showing off her perfectly aligned, gleaming white teeth, but somehow it felt forced.

“And you have not had any recurrent episodes?” the doctor inquired, narrowing his eyes.

“None whatsoever.”

“Mmmm”, he paused and the silence seemed to last for hours, “well, I will do a physical examination and if everything checks out fine, I will sign the application form for you to apply for a child, but I will have to include your history of depression or my licence could be revoked so I can’t promise that you will be declared suitable for pregnancy.”

“No doctor, thank you doctor”, Mary tapped her fingers nervously on her lap.

Jon quickly covered his hand over hers to disguise the display of nervous tension. He didn’t want her to be written off as neurotic.

After a battery of tests, heart and lungs, ear, nose and throat, radiation free X-rays and exceedingly painful pelvic examinations, she was ordered to get dressed and go home.

“There is a waiting list”, said Dr Godleave, “so it may be a while before you hear whether you have been successful.”

They filled out the form which was to be sent to the governing ministry and then went home, hardly daring to hope.

Six Months Later

Every morning Mary ran to check her replica 20th century post box for instant telegrams and she connected to her computer to check that too, but she was always disappointed.

“No news again?” Jon asked as he bit on a piece of toast, wearing his perspiration-free, temperature-controlled pyjamas.

“No”, she said despondently, staring at the empty post box in the front yard.

At work she didn’t join in with the office gossip and turned off her ears when Rowan was complaining about the number of times Sarah woke him up at night to go to the bathroom, or the fact that she kept snapping at him. He was lucky to be a father at all.

Then it happened, one morning, she remembered it clearly: February 1st 2177, she walked to the post box expecting to be disappointed yet again, only to see an instant telegram materialise before her eyes. There was one addressed to Jon’s grandma too. She half screamed, which caused Jon to come running.

“It’s here, Jon, it’s here!”

The governing ministry of health stamp was all over it and suddenly she felt too sick to open it. They went back into the house, where grandma was sitting at the dining table, sipping coffee. The domestic-bot, George, walked over to her and held out a coffee pot.

“More coffee, Mrs Freeman Senior?” it asked politely.

“No thank you, George”, she said, placing her cup on a saucer and looking up at her grandson with a quizzical brow, “Has the letter come?”

“Yes”, said Jon, tearing it from Mary’s hand and opening it before she could protest. His eyes scanned it before waves of defeat seemed to wash over him.

It read:

Dear Mr and Mrs Freeman

While all examinations show that Mrs Freeman is in perfect physical health, her history of depression and need for depression-neutralising injections after the death of her mother lead the ministry of health to conclude that she has a depressive personality and therefore she is unfit for motherhood. The application is denied.

Mary’s throat caught in a sob and she had to grab onto the table to steady herself. Grandma sighed and motioned to Jon to give her a hug, while proceeding to open her own telegram. A strangled cry escaped from her lips.

“It’s the ministry”, she gasped, “I failed my last OAP wellness check and they’re giving me a week to get my affairs in order before I have to….have to have my chip turned off.”

The telegram dropped to the floor as she put her head in her hands.

Mary had stopped crying immediately and both she and Jon stared incredulously at her, too shocked to consider their own predicament. Then Mary stamped her feet in defiance.

“This isn’t right!” she yelled, “Grandma is only 75 and there’s nothing wrong with her!”

“My fingers hurt!” wailed grandma, “They said my anti-inflammation gene isn’t working properly!”

Of course, gene therapy had meant that any problems which cropped up could be reversed, but just like the ageing process, gene copies became less and less exact, like fading photocopies. Eventually there was little that could be done. If a problem occurred in a person’s youth, gene therapy would immediately be offered (although the need was rare since people were born disease resistant anyway). When it happened in the elderly, there was less desire to spend the thousands it took on a therapy that was by then, less effective. As most elderly people were retired, they were no longer contributing financially to society and therefore it was deemed cheaper and easier to turn off their chips. This was something that was marketed as environmental conservation through population control and euthanasia, or ‘mercy killing’ to prevent suffering in the most vulnerable elderly. It had almost seemed attractive - thoughtful and kind - until the moment it was to be applied to Mary’s family.

Mary stamped again, like a two-year-old in a supermarket when she is told she can’t have sweets.

“So you have a little arthritis!? Big deal, is that a reason to kill you? And why shouldn’t I have a baby, why is being upset my mum died such an offence!? I’m human!”

She started wailing too and soon the two of them were caterwauling so loudly that George turned on some disco music from the 1970’s to drown them out. Jon, however, was strangely quiet. He rubbed his chin meditatively, staring at the 2018 antique tablecloth grandma had picked up from a vintage store that now adorned their table.

He raised his hands.

“Enough! You’re right, this isn’t right and I’m going to do something about it. Grandma is not going to die in a week and we will have a baby.”

Mary looked at him through her tears.

“How?”, she croaked

“We will have one ourselves, without help, and we will leave and take grandma with us.”

Authored by Joanna K Jones, a copywriter with a special interest in medical science, natural health and ethics. She is also a mother and grandmother who is active in politics and disability rights.